About

As UF's Digital Scholarship Librarian, my work focuses on socio-technical (people, policies, technologies, communities) needs for scholarly cyberinfrastructure. I work heavily with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) where I am the Digital Scholarship Director, Digital Humanities Working Group and the DH Graduate Certificate, LibraryPress@UF where I am the Editor-in-Chief, and Research Computing with these and other activities geared towards enabling a culture of radical collaboration that values and supports diversity and inclusivity. Thoughts are my own. Pronouns: she, her, hers; or, we, our, ours.

open access

As the scholarly publishing landscape heats up with more talk of boycotts and Open Access mandates, research libraries increasingly find themselves at a crossroads between publishers and faculty — and eagerly working to provide new solutions to entrenched problems. The California Digital Library’s (CDL) latest foray into this space, on behalf of the University of California system, focuses on supporting open source publishing infrastructure through a major development partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). As a result of this agreement, the CDL will assist with PKP’s ongoing development and support of its open source software suite — Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference SystemsRead More →

MLA’s Profession 2011 is out and it includes six articles within the section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship.” All of the articles within “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” are openly available (no library subscription needed), excellent, timely, and needed. It is critically important for academia to engage and grapple with concerns over the evaluation of digital scholarship. This work is specifically needed to develop the necessary supports for evaluating digital scholarship as scholarship that “counts” for promotion and tenure. The official evaluation is difficult because traditional reporting separates work into three categories: research, teaching (or core job duties in some instances, as it is for me as a tenure-trackRead More →

Europeana has released their second whitepaper, Whitepaper No. 2: The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid. The whitepaper begins with an excellent example, that of the yellow Milkmaid: ‘The Milkmaid’, one of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous pieces, depicts a scene of a woman quietly pouring milk into a bowl. During a survey the Rijksmuseum discovered that there were over 10,000 copies of the image on the internet—mostly poor, yellowish reproductions. As a result of all of these low-quality copies on the web, according to the Rijksmuseum, “people simply didn’t believe the postcards in our museum shop were showing the original painting. This was the trigger for us to put high-resolution images of the originalRead More →

UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) lists many important Open Access initiatives and programs. One of those listed is the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), for which the University of Florida is the technical partner. There’s more on GOAP below and more on dLOC on the dLOC site (www.dloc.com), which is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides open access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections. Global Open Access Portal The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP), funded by the Governments of Colombia, Denmark, Norway,Read More →

The University of Florida Libraries joined the HathiTrust Digital Library to expand digital access to orphan works, as announced July 14, 2011. As of July 19, 2011, the Orphan works list from the University of Michigan is now live. Much of the news on HathiTrust is focused on access to the digitized materials. That’s important and great work, but the orphan works list and clearing rights to make them accessible is enormously important work. Even if HathiTrust was only using the digitized materials as part of the components to power the orphan works list, it would be an excellent use of resources. Libraries and culturalRead More →

University of Florida journals can now easily take advantage of hosting using Open Journal Systems (OJS). The Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA) has a hosted instance of OJS. FCLA hosts and supports OJS for UF and all State Universities. Several journals are already using OJS and all can be seen from the main OJS page: http://journals.fcla.edu. Open Journal Systems is open source journal management and publishing software developed, supported, and freely distributed by the Public Knowledge Project under the GNU General Public License. The system facilitates the entire peer review and publishing process, and the work flow support is shown here. Many have alreadyRead More →

The UF Digital Collections include Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” & the Robinsonades, a digital collection of various editions of Robinson Crusoe and similarly themed texts such as the popular The Swiss Family Robinson, all from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. The collection is an excellent resource for scholars and Digital Defoe is an excellent scholarly journal that has just announced the publication of it’s second issue, as detailed below. News Announcement: We are excited to announce the publication of the second issue of Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, the peer-reviewed online journal of the Defoe Society that celebrates the worksRead More →

Europeana has released their Public Domain Charter. The document seeks not be be prescriptive, but to foster discussion and innovation to aid cultural heritage institutions in meeting their core missions with costly digitization as a new and growing part of that mission. This is one of the best documents I’ve seen in terms of explaining the necessity and difficulty of balancing support for open and free public access with the costs of creating and maintaining digitized content. See the excerpt from the Public Domain Charter below, with my bolding of significant portions for emphasis: This Charter is a policy statement […] [T]he transformation from guardians ofRead More →

International Publishers and Librarians Agree to Enhance The Debate on Open Access Geneva/The Hague 20 May 2009 – For immediate release A joint statement released today by the International Publishers Association, the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) calls for a more rational, evidence based debate on open access. It encourages experimentation and piloting of new concepts and ideas, whilst acknowledging that the differences in the different academic disciplines and publishing traditions may lead to differentiated approaches and business models in support of authors. The joint statement is intended to move theRead More →

President Barack Obama has already begun implementing important changes, including restoring public access to presidential records by revoking the Bush administration’s Executive Order 13233. The text for President Obama’s executive order is available on the Whitehouse website.Read More →